Summary: Stiles loses everyone he loves and has to give birth desolate and alone, dealing with grief and fear. Notes: This story was originally posted on my AO3 profile by myself, so please don't tell me it's plagiarized from there, for I am the one who put it there! Scott died mid Season 5 along with the Sheriff and most of the other characters. This leaves Stiles scared, along and confused, only to find out that he is not only a dormant werewolf himself, but also pregnant with Scott's baby. The relationship isn't established but may have just been starting when everything went awry. The friendship with OC is established, and there is not pairing between her and Stiles. There are a few things I have to acknowledge. The term Materazzi comes from a book I read but for the life of me I cannot remember it's name... Corvenus comes from Underworld. The concept of the Sons of Corvenus is loosely based on the concept of the Sons of Ipswich from The Covenant.
The quote is from Tolkien.
And I can't think of what else I used that I must acknowledge, but basically all I own is my OC (Vitali Reiss, and yes I know Vitali is a male name, bite me) This work is un-beta'd and its 3am and English is my second language, so there most certainly will be errors. Sorry. I may edit the story again later to improve it a bit. And there will probably be more stories related to this one later. Depending on how much attention this one draws.
After his dad dies and he lost his best friend Stiles decided to leave Beacon Hill. Theo had taken over everything and there was nothing that Stiles could do on his own. He had lost everything and everyone he knew was dead.
For a while afterward he felt strange, sick in a way. He figured that what he and Scott had done had changed him into a wolf. To be honest, they didn't even consider the possibility at the time. For some reason he didn't mind once he figured it out. He figured that he was in complete control, for some unfathomable reason, seeing as the full moon had come and gone by then. Before he left town he broke into Derek's loft in an attempt to find some answers as to how exactly sex may have led to this. Derek was long gone, but Stiles did manage to find a suspicious looking old leather bound book. The name on the inside inscription took him by surprise. It read For Vitali Reiss, a gift from a master surpassed by her student.
Stiles had vivid memories of Vitali. She came to Beacon Hills about 2 years prior to see Derek - they were old friends. Despite the fact that Scott and the others didn't like or trust her, Stile grew quite close to her. But that seemed like a lifetime ago. The book, Stiles learned, had no title and no index. He flipped through the old pages and found that he had struck gold. He supposed it was some type of beastiery specifically dedicated to werewolves and it contained a whole lot of medical stuff too.
He spent the next few months studying it in intimate detail. In lieu of what to do with himself now, and weary of his newly acquired lycanthropy Stiles decided to seek refuge in his father's old log cabin deep in the woods. He knew he'd be safe there at least seeing as not a living soul knew about the place. His father had been stockpiling supplies there too when things started to go south in Beacon Hills.
Vitali's book scared him. There was a lot of stuff he didn't understand but he found what he was looking for. There was a long layout about the Sons of Corvenus and to his utter shock he recognized one of the names of the original five. These were 5 men bitten and turned by Mattheus Corvenus himself. The names were listed in order of 'appearance' as it were, in the order they were bitten in.
Stumpp was the first, but everyone knew he was a murderous maniac and was killed fairly early on, only his son survived to carry on the name. The second was Polatsk, followed by Natalis, then Vitali's family name: Reiss. It was the last one that drew Stiles' attention: Garnier. This was his mother's maiden name.
Later, in a different part of the book he read that certain bloodlines related to the original Sons of Corvenus eventually became dormant and that certain things can trigger the gene to activate. So technically Stiles was born a werewolf. He slowly went over some of the listed examples of possible triggers until one caught his eye and knocked the breath out of his body. Impregnation by a True Alpha, born or bitten. The book mentioned nothing about sex on it's own and that was the only one that even remotely fit into Stiles' recent past.
He knew from all his conversations with Vitali that certain coveted males could conceive, carry, and bear a child, but it was rare and he never considered that it would ever apply to himself of anyone he knew. The only one he knew about that could do that was Derek, and he wasn't even supposed to know that, so he was sworn to secrecy.
Stiles then proceeded to scour the book for some way to test this new and slightly terrifying theory. He needed to be sure whether he was pregnant or not!
Eventually he found what he was looking for. This book must be the holy grail of all things lycanthrope and he thanked every star in the sky that he had found it. It mentioned the old myth that werewolves burn when touching silver. Apparently it was not an entirely unfounded theory. Because of the hormonal compound and subsequent chemical effect of a werewolf pregnancy it caused their skin to be sensitive of silver. It wasn't necessarily a burn, more of a type of contact dermatitis. But none of these technicalities mattered much to Stiles as he stood in the bathroom staring blankly at the red welt on the palm of his hand where his mother's silver cross had been a few minutes earlier.
The feeling was indescribable. He felt a strange mix of hope and absolute desolation. It gave him hope and a bit of happiness to realize that he didn't lose everything after all and that he would always have a little of Scott in his life. But the prospect of going through all this alone, facing what was to come so completely alone left him breathless and sick to his stomach with worry and desolation. He could try and find Derek or Vitali but he was pretty sure that both of them were out of the country and he had no possible way to contact them and no idea where to start looking.
In the end he couldn't face the possibility of endangering the baby - not after everything he had already lost. So he made the hardest decision he ever had to make in his life. He decided to stay there, alone in the woods, far away from the horrors outside. Lone wolves were not known to survive long without a pack but Stiles never had one to begin with which technically made him a vagabond, and as the book says - not all those who wander are lost. So maybe he had a chance after all.
For the first few months Stiles cried himself to sleep every night. The silence and the loneliness was crushing him. But after a while he grew numb to it. Every so often he would take cautious walks into the seemingly idyllic forest around him. The subtle sounds of nature that surrounded him calmed his aching and restless soul somewhat.
The first time in months that Stiles smiled caught him slightly off-guard. It had become such a rare occasion for him to smile that it actually hurt his face. He was sitting on the front steps, watching the small stream that ran a few meters in front of the cabin, when suddenly the baby moved. It sent a jolt of untamed emotion through him. The smile soon turned to tears. Although this time it was tears of relief. This had been the first sign of life he she had given him - the first time that, for a few moments at least, he didn't feel so utterly and completely alone.
Stiles studied the instructions and notes about pregnancy and birth religiously. He prepared everything months in advance and checked for signs of complication or miscarriage at least every second day. The book was his lifeline, he felt like Vitali was guiding him in her own mysterious way. Maybe someday he would find the magnificent true Alpha female and thank her for it. Assuming she and Derek weren't dead as well.
As his time grew nearer he was constantly plagued by anxiety and he could feel it weakening him. The book talked about pain management and relaxation and a lot about the art of deep breathing but Stiles was sceptical about all that stuff. What he found slightly more helpful were Vitali's numerous notes in the margins. She had vigorously scratched out the word 'compliance' and replaced it with trust. He found it odd at first that trust was such an issue. The book referred to compliance with (or as Vitali put it: trust of) the Materazzi assisting in the delivery. The problem with this obviously was the Stiles was alone, there was no assist. It occurred to him then as he all but heard Vitali's voice in his head "Trust yourself Stilinski". He half laughed to himself and slammed the book shut "yeah right". He all but whispered. His voice was coarse from disuse, but it made his baby dance around inside him, giving him comfort in knowing that someone was listening.
The day before the pain started Stile couldn't stop thinking about Scott. It felt like his soul was physically aching for the alpha and he spent most of the day crying softly. When he woke up in the middle of the night with a dull ache in his back he knew it was starting. As terrified as he had been before, he manage to will the panic away by shifting his focus to his body and trying to identify what was changing and how it felt. It helped more than he expected it to. His labour progressed slowly as he knew it would.
He found that by focusing on the sensations in his body he managed to clear the panic from his head. The pain wasn't bad yet so he paced around the cabin going through everything he had learned from the book.
It was a few hours before the pain actually started to bother him. The contractions were about 8 minutes apart by then. He wasn't near his limit yet, but he was starting to be a little anxious, and it was really beginning to hurt. He ran himself a bath, thanking his father for installing a thermal heater for hot water all those years ago. He tried to relax in the hot water, but he was becoming more and more distressed as time went on. It felt like the contractions were constricting his whole body and he kept hyperventilating and then having to force his breathing to slow down. It took him almost three hours of this desperate state to finally figure out what was going on. And then he figured it out he cursed himself for having missed it in the first place. His labour was slowing down and the desperate constricting feeling was because his water hadn't broken. He knew from the book that as soon as his water broke the urgency would dissipate.
The Materazzi practitioners had a special instrument with which they broke water, but Stiles recalled 3 little words scribbled in the margin of that section that made him a little more nervous than he already was: nails work too.
He had to stare at his hand for quite a while before he saw his nails sharpen and elongate. Pain kept you human so the wolf was far out of reach at this point. His hand was shaking and he felt like he was dying. He couldn't breathe and he could barely move. His resolve was slipping and as another surge of pain gripped him he felt like just giving up. It felt like it was going on forever, Stiles was digging his sharp nails into his thigh, drawing blood which added to the pain he was already in, which in turn make the claws retract. In the blind haze of pain and desperation he could swear he was losing it as he tried to find some sort of anchor. He could see Scott in front of him but he was so far out of reach and as he closed his eyes and tried to focus on the chaos that wracked his body he began to realize that he could not do this alone and that he and his baby were going to die like this. As the realization ebbed in his tired mind he heard a voice echoing around him. It rippled across the false image of Scott trying to help him until the image was gone and only the voice and the pain remained. The voice was Vitali's. "What are you doing Stiles? Didn't I tell you to trust yourself?" He almost sobbed when, for a moment, he thought that she had really found he knew she wasn't really there. "I can't do this alone…" He was trying to fight the contraction that was building inside of him. "It doesn't matter, you have to do something." He gritted his teeth as the pain peaked before it started to ebb away again, leaving just the panic behind. "I'll hurt her…"
"You're not alone Stiles." The voice in his head whispered in his ear. He laughed bitterly and choked out a sob. "You're not even here. You're not real."
"No. But she is."
The words made his heart pound faster and he snapped his eyes open. Stiles looked at his hand again and focused on the claws that appeared very slowly. As if in a trance, without thinking about it, he reached the sharp claws down and all but grazed the vulnerable portion of the amniotic sack that he could reach. There was a sudden rush as something gave inside of him. It left him dizzy and breathless, but he could feel the urgency and panic leaving him. His mind cleared and he realized that the water was cold and the sun was rising again. Which meant that it must have been around 18 hours by now.
He was still wracked with pain as he got out of the tub and then kneeled next to the bed on a bunch of towels he had laid out there. He was shaking and exhausted and the contractions were getting closer and closer together, but the overpowering sense of dread was mercifully gone.
He breathed through the next few hours of drawn out contractions begging whatever god he did or did not believe in that it would be over soon. He was still terrified and had no idea how he was going to do this, but he now had a different feeling inside him - determination.
Transition was the worst, and he hadn't fathomed it possible that anything could be worse than the three hours of desperation before his water broke, but this was worse. He clung with all his might to what he had read in the book. The urge to push was overwhelming, but the words, in Vitali's stern voice, kept echoing like mantra in his tired mind. He felt like screaming at the top of his lungs and just begging for death at that point, but he needed to survive for the sake of his baby. For the sake of Scott's baby. A thought occurred to him in his haze of near delirium and he found it pretty impressive that he actually hadn't screamed at all yet. He chalked it up to instinct as he figured it would probably just attract danger. Every nerve in his body was on fire and his instincts were screaming at him to just give in and bear down. But Vitali's voice in his tired mind was adamant. Pushing during transition could kill the baby and injure Stiles terribly. He wasn't dilated enough. Transition was how the body prepared the birth canal for the baby's passage, it stretched it out the last few centimeters and pushing now would most certainly rip him apart and break his baby's bones. He couldn't bare the thought of that. So he just sank as low to the floor as possible, almost splitting completely - which he was more than capable of he had realized early on in his life. The extra space and the angle of his pelvis in this position eased the transition process. It was an agonizing two hours before he began to feel the baby move into the canal.
As much as this new sensation terrified him so much more, he was actually elated. He was fully dilated and the baby was close to crowning. He took a few calculated deep breaths before gingerly repositioning himself in a better kneeling position that gave the baby more space to actually come out. He was beyond exhausted and the pain was excruciating, not to mention to heavy pressure on his pelvis.
It had started raining heavily at some point during the day, but it was now almost midnight again, marking a 24 hour mark for him. As he felt another contraction building he gripped one hand tightly into the sheets and rested his forehead on the edge of the bed, steadying himself, while the other hand dropped down to provide some counter pressure so he hopefully doesn't tear too badly. Stiles realized then that she was close that he could touch the top of her head and he could feel her heart beating through her scalp on his finger tips. This gave him the determination he needed.
"Come on baby. It's me and you now. We can do this."
As the next contraction built up and matured he tentatively bore down. He gasped at how much it actually hurt. He found a rhythm of long and steady pushes and he focused on actually being able to do something seemingly productive. He managed to groan and breath and push his way through several of these horrendous contractions before he started to actually feel himself stretching. His progress was painfully slow, but he knew that he was making progress and could feel her head slowly enter the world. He had to fight the urge to just push with all his might and get it over with as quickly as possible, but he didn't want to break her collarbone and he really didn't want to tear. He would never forgive himself if he hurt his baby to spare himself. So he continued fighting this slow and meticulous fight.
When her head was finally out he found that he could catch his breath for a few moments. He was soaked in sweat and shaking uncontrollably with the pain and effort. He was exhausted, desperate, and felt utterly alone. But for the moment he focused on the task at hand and tried to force the tears away as he felt around her neck and realized with shock that the cord was wrapped around her neck. He remembered that before he got to panic about this he first had to establish whether it was a panic worthy situation. He stuck his fingers in underneath the cord and found with a notable sigh of relief that it was lax and quite easily moved off her neck, so the likelihood that she had choked was miniscule at best. He allowed her to slowly turn on her own so he could more easily free her shoulders from his body. The automatic action of the turning baby caused him more pain.
He then struggled for what seemed like forever to bare the shoulders and almost passed out from the pain and effort, and then with a final push almost passed out again from the sudden relief from most of the pain he had been wracked with for so long.
Somehow though, he managed to hold it together. He brought the baby up to his chest as he gingerly changed his position so he was sitting with his back against the bed. Once again he thanked Vitali for the book because if he hadn't read it he would be beside himself at this moment. He was panting and his vision was blurry from the sudden change in blood pressure, but more alarming than that was the complete silence. The baby wasn't crying. But he made a point of consciously memorizing that this was normal for babies born of males and it only really meant that she was calm. So as long as she was alert and breathing, it was completely normal. And as he stared down at her in complete awe he knew that she was fine.
Every inch of her was absolutely perfect. Her dark hair a contrast to her pale skin, and from what he could tell she had dark eyes too, but that might change over the next few days. Not that he cared. She was here and she was okay. He, on the other hand, was nauseous, dirty, and exhausted, and the process wasn't over yet. But he barely noticed the sharp cramping as he expelled the afterbirth. Her calmness was making him calm, and the small noises she was making was making his heart melt.
She was a testament of better times. She was a reminder of the life he once had with his family and with his friends, people he would never see again, but people who meant so very much to him. But most of all she was a beacon of hope for the future.
His love and his hope made flesh and bone by his body. She was absolutely perfect.
Once most of the uncontrollable shaking had stopped he somehow managed to find the strength to take a bath and clean off his newborn daughter. He got rid of the bloodied towels by burying them under the firepit outside so wild animals wouldn't be drawn to the smell of his blood.
When he was satisfied with that he finally collapsed on the bed, lying on his side with his baby safely against his chest where he could place a protective hand over her small chest. His body was beginning to relax and unwind, which was a different kind of pain in itself, a dull ache that radiated all over him. He watched the baby drift to sleep and was once again in tears at the thought that Scott and his dad would never meet her. His heart ached with longing while his soul sang with joy and he was bitter at the injustice of it all. It wasn't fair to be this happy and this sad at the same time.
This was his final thought as exhaustion finally dragged him down into sleep. At least in his dreams he could introduce their daughter to her father. But the false joy was too soon interrupted by the cold reality once he awoke again.
Stiles named the baby Asha and 10 days after she was born he made his way to the nearest big city, determined to find Vitali, or Derek, he would settle for either one at this point.
He had barely checked in to his motel room in Sacramento when he picked up a soothing scent of soft burnt sage. He opened the door before she could knock, but she didn't even skip a beat.
"Where the hell have you been Stilinski? We've been looking for you all over the damn place for months and then all of a sudden a charge shows up on your credit card in Sacramento! We were worried sick!" Vitali protested.
Stiles barely heard her. He threw his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. She seemed a little taken aback at first, but didn't hesitate to hug him back just as viciously.
"You smell different, Stiles. Are you okay?" She asked with her usual calm demeanor.
He nodded. "Who's we?"
"Me and Derek. He's in Beacon Hills. Says someone broke into his loft and took something we need back in a bad way."
"Yeah, about that…" he began but stopped once he saw that she had noticed the baby lying in the middle of the bed.
"Stiles… What…" He waved the book at her and placed it back on the table. "Do you know what my mom's maiden name was?" He didn't wait for her to answer. "It was Garnier."
She was beginning to connect the dots, and was completely speechless, which was very out of character for her.
"This booked saved my life in more ways than you can imagine." He added as he closed the door behind her.
She just smiled, walking over to the baby. "It's the Materazzi journal. And I've never been so glad that someone stole it in my life." She whispered as she laid her hand over the sleeping infant's chest in an uncharacteristically loving way.
Stiles rubbed the back of his neck trying to keep the tears at bay. "Why were you looking for me?"
She looked up at him. "To bring you home."
Notes: R & R is appreciated Let me know if you want a sequel Maybe I bring Scott back, maybe I don't. Let me know what you want to see happen.